Heart Activities

The last couple of times when I had my “extras”, we did crafts with hearts. Valentine’s day allows for a lot of different, fun activities for preschool aged kids. These are a couple of crafts we did.

Marshmallow hearts. I printed a heart made of dots online, and gave them a bowl of marshmallows. They had to put a marshmallow on each dot, before they could eat them. This was a real challenge. More because they wanted to eat the marshmallows than anything else. “I’m t’ungry” I heard a lot during this activity.

We decided instead of playdoh one day, we would play with clay. We made different shapes – hearts, circles and triangles (and snakes) this day. Then I baked their creations and glued leftover magnets to the backs of the flat creations.

I cut many hearts out of colorful paper. Some I numbered for the game above, and some I left so that I could play heart hop with the kids. They started by jumping from heart to heart. Then we jumped from color to color. Then we placed our hands on one color and feet on another. It was fun until the babies started eating our paper hearts. After playing heart hop (I didn’t get a picture of this), the kids sat at the table with the hearts that I numbered. Each kid was given some oyster crackers, a numbered heart and were supposed to fill each circle with a cracker and count to that number. My youngest nephew, pictured here, really loved the crackers and didn’t quite understand that I wanted him to “decorate” the heart before eating them. But I let the eating happen this time, as I learned my lesson from the marshmallow activity above.

Here the kids made Valentine’s mailboxes (pictured in their laps), heart dog hats (on their heads) and bead necklaces (on their necks). We also made some Valentine’s, mosiac hearts and ate Heart pasta for lunch. I bought some heart marshmallows from Aldi recently, and they also got one of those as well.

Our experiment had to wait until the end of the day. Finnegan insisted on being included in the science experiment, because he doesn’t get to do science at school yet. So while the kids did different activities, I took white all purpose glue and drew hearts on a paper for each child. While the glue is still wet, I sprinkled each paper with some baking soda and shook it around so the glue was nicely covered.

I let the papers dry for a couple of hours. When it was time to do the experiment, I placed the papers on a baking sheet and gave the kids all a pipette and vinegar in a small bowl. They squeezed the vinegar on each heart to create a fizzing heart. I found this experiment on Pinterest and it looked easy and fun.